As a reviewer, you play a vital role in ensuring that all articles submitted to Ar Rehla: Journal of Islamic Tourism, Halal Food, Islamic Traveling, and Creative Economy are of sufficient academic quality and novelty to both appeal to readers and advance our goal to accelerate the development of Islamic tourism studies, halal culinary tours, syar'i tours / worship such as Hajj, Umrah, or pilgrimages of Islamic heritage, as well as creative economy that does not conflict with Islamic law.
These guidelines will help you understand your responsibilities as a reviewer, as well as your ethical obligations to both the journal and the authors. You will also be introduced to what you should be looking for in a manuscript, so that your review will be both thorough and consistent with those of other reviewers.
As a reviewer, you will be responsible for reading the manuscript and evaluating its suitability for publication in Ar Rehla. You will be expected to provide constructive, impartial, unambiguous, and honest feedback to the authors, with the purpose of encouraging them to improve their manuscript.
Ar Rehla is committed to supporting the development of young academics and up-and-coming political thinkers. Any author who submits to the journal should, regardless of whether their manuscript is accepted, be left with a positive experience and have improved as a writer and researcher. While reviews should be critical, they should not be detrimental to accurate scientific communication. Therefore, any review that in any way denigrates or discourages an author from re-submitting to this or another journal will immediately be discarded, and any reviewer that attacks an author or their work will be blacklisted.
Ar Rehla relies on the impartiality and discretion of reviewers, and as a reviewer, you are entrusted with confidential material meant solely for critical evaluation. We expect you to treat all documents and correspondence related to the review with the appropriate level of discretion.
Before you agree to review a manuscript, you should be certain that you have the necessary expertise and time to provide a critical evaluation of the article. You should ensure that:
Ar Rehla uses an online submission and peer review system. When a reviewer is requested to review a paper submitted to Ar Rehla, they will have a journal account created for them, through which they will be able to read the abstract and decide on whether to agree to review it.
If you have been requested to review a paper, simply log into your reviewer account, read the provided abstract, and indicate whether you agree to review it. If you decline to review the manuscript, please include the reason why, and if possible, suggest an alternate reviewer from a similar field.
To ensure the integrity of the peer-review process, all further correspondence will be through this system, with the reviewer being given access to the full manuscript and provided with a review page to fill out and submit. If you wish, you can also provide comments directly on the manuscript file, but be sure that all comments are made anonymously and focus on the content of the article, not its layout or formatting.
A good review looks at both the overall quality of the manuscript and the accuracy and precision of its details. The former is informed by the latter. When evaluating a manuscript for Ar Rehla, look at the following aspects:
In addition to the above criteria, also pay attention to whether the manuscript contains instances of plagiarism, improper referencing, re-publication, or fraud. Things to look for:
Publication ethics is not limited to these four items. If you believe the authors have attempted to mislead readers, infringed upon a copyright or patent, or might jeopardize the integrity of the journal in any other way, please contact the handling editor.
Once you have gathered enough information to make a decision on the manuscript, log into your Ar Rehla account to complete the review. At minimum, you will be required to grade the manuscript based on the aforementioned criteria, as well as to summarize your major findings and give your overall impression of the article. We encourage you to optionally take the opportunity to comment on the manuscript in more detail, and provide specific suggestions that might improve any aspect of it.
If you have made specific comments in the manuscript file, remember to anonymize them.
It's important to ensure that all comments are constructive and intended to better the quality of the manuscript or otherwise help the authors understand where they went wrong. Please reconsider making comments that fall out of this purview, and avoid making comments that belittle or disparage the work.
Follow good commenting practices. For example:
Your final task as a reviewer will be to recommend that the manuscript be a) accepted as is, b) accepted with minor revisions, c) accepted with major revisions, d) accepted with major revisions (requiring a re-review), e) rejected but with a recommendation to re-submit after the work is more developed, or f) outright rejected. If your recommendation is to reject the manuscript, you should explain your reasons why.
Each recommendation should be supported by the facts of the evaluation, and backed with constructive criticism. Be aware that you are one of at least two reviewers. Even if your recommendation differs from the other reviewers' recommendations, a good critical review will enable us to make an informed final decision on the manuscript. Also note that the final decision on the manuscript is made by the editorial board, taking into account the recommendation of each review, and your recommendation might not be reflected in this decision.
